Sewers and Pretty Roses

In the literature of city reminiscences I have seen little about sewers, not Parisian or Venetian, but Brooklyn. I would not bet against someone doing, or having done, a carefully researched magazine piece on the New York City sewer system, but that is not my intent.

Before I had baseball at the Parade Grounds and fishing at Prospect Park Lake, the neighborhood storm drains and sewers, all one as far as we boys were concerned, were important. A round, middle-of-the-street sewer cover in front of the apartment house at 410 Westminster Road was always second-base for our punchball games. Car fenders, as more and more parking spaces were filled, served for first and third bases, but occasionally we had to use a rock to draw one, as we did with home plate, chalk being a luxury we usually didn't possess. The round sewer covers (that shape making it impossible for them to fall through the hole, I heard that on the radio recently, probably on National Public Radio) were also a measuring unit, with a one sewer-to-sewer distance a good carry for a punched ball, two for a stickball hit. I believe they also had a hole in the center through which my younger brother insists cops dropped confiscated stickball bats. I did not witness that. There were also larger diameter--the center-of-the-street sewer covers were about three feet in diameter--covers for the holes leading to, I think it was electrical wires, but they were not set down the center of the street, just halfway between the curb and the center, a useless position for our games of stickball and punchball.

(The subject of city street games has attracted better investigative journalists than I, but it should be noted that the major distinction between bigger kids and smaller, between boys and girls, was the ability to hit a spaldeen by throwing it up in the air and punching it with an overhand motion, stepping into it exactly like throwing a ball. Bouncing it and hitting it underhanded was the way an inferior way to hit it, for the ball wouldn't carry as far, although skinny Stephanie Schiffran could give it a pretty good whack this way.)

The storm drains at the end of each block were the enemies, on occasion, for a well-hit ball could roll through the grate, or into the rectangular opening between grate and sidewalk, like a soccer or hockey goal. About five feet down, on leaves or water, that new spaldeen would float, meaning the end of the game unless it could be retrieved. All mankind is adaptable, not just kids growing up on a farm, and the stickball bat plus a wire hanger swiped from someone's home became our retriever, a close relative of the golf ball retrievers some of us high handicappers carry all the time for use in ponds and creeks.

Having fashioned my own stick-plus-wire retriever, I began to roam the neighborhood, up Dorchester Road down Rugby to Ditmas, checking out each storm sewer for lost but not retrieved balls. Some of them were in sorry condition, but occasionally I found a good one. I would scream at my own youngsters if they engaged in such activities, but cholera was not a problem, and my folks never knew that I engaged in such unsanitary pursuits. Perhaps my brush with polio was a result of my sewer forays, but then again they may have immunized me to a certain extent.

The drains would clog on occasion, creating pond-like puddles at the corner next to the old Morses' gray house. Somehow I was never attracted to the joys of taking off my shoes and wading. The same sewer, in a drier season, once became a source of fascination for a neighborhood cat that was so absorbed in looking down it that she didn't hear me coming up behind it to kick it in the rear end. Fortunately, the cat, shocked and surprised, grabbed hold somehow and did not go through the big opening. I'm glad no one was watching, and I still try to make amends to catdom by filleting an occasionally mullet left over from a fishing trip for our resident mother and daughter felines, Patches and Ginky.

The Morses' corner house had rose bushes out front, stretching toward the corner sewer where I had played "kick the cat." I liked roses, both for their color and aroma, but such an appreciation is not an acceptable topic for ten-year-old boys. But one day, the sewer and the roses came together, for I had spotted a small wood boat that had somehow gotten through the drain. Maybe someone had been sailing it in the Westminster Road gutter-stream after a rainstorm, but I felt that I could tell my friends about it when I saw them that spring afternoon.

"Hey, come see what I've found," this to Mark Congress whose family rented the upstairs of one of the three-story houses near the end of the block, and the DeMartino boys and maybe even Donald McClune, "Big" Donald as opposed to me, "Little" Donald.

"What is it?" from the guys who were lying on a slanted lawn debating whether to play "King of the Hill" and risk a protest from the owner of the house who had only daughters.

"Come on." They followed. "It better be good."

"It is," I lied, the way brokers later talked to me on the phone. Almost at the corner, I thought of a good joke. "Look at the pretty roses," I exclaimed, as if I had made them get up and follow me just to see some flowers. No one thought it funny. A cascade of derision followed, but I hastened to add that I was kidding and had something more to show them.

We didn't retrieve the boat from the sewer, but my suspicions were confirmed. Beautiful flowers next to the sewer meant nothing to my companions. I hope that later in life they were forced to tour the Botanical Gardens or someone's flowering estate. But I was also the cruel boy. Roses and sewers and cats.